Quilts, quilts and more quilts

Well I'm just about caught up on everything so I thought I'd tell you about my trip to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC on Friday. I haven't been to this show before and was a little overwhelmed when I was faced with rows and rows of amazing art quilts! There was too much too look at so I wandered off to look at the vendor's stands instead. I enjoyed picking up little bits and pieces rather than large quantities of fabric and saw some fantastic work. I didn't realise how artistic some of the art quilts can be! I didn't think to take my camera with me but I did take some shots on my phone so I'll see how those come out. For today I wanted to show you what I bought, won and was given.

First of all what I bought. A lovely array of fat quarters, lutradur, postcards and printing materials. I also bought a fantastic book that shows how Gail Lawther translated photographs of a trip to New Zealand into beautiful art quilts. If you get the chance to see it - do take a look!

I took a short workshop called Threadplay while at the show. We were faced with 12 sewing machines all set up with different needles, thread, feet etc. We had 3 minutes to try each set up then a whistle was blown and we moved onto the next machine. The time went in a flash but we tried out some great combinations that we would just never get around to trying at home. This is my sample - we wrote numbers next to each stitch and at the end we took away a numbered list of all the combinations. Great fun :)


They even gave us a goodie bag with 3 full-size reels of threads and a sample of fabric wash.


I also entered a raffle to win a 'Little Gem' mini art quilt to raise money for a charity and I won! I was really pleased as I don't have anyone else's work to encourage me and to compare my own work to. It was especially good that my winning quilt was a very cheery number so will look beautiful in my studio. (The quilt looks much neater in real life but I didn't flatten it out properly before I took the photo.)

Hopefully I'll have some good mobile phone photos of the quilts to show you tomorrow.